We’ve been a bit quiet lately. As always, we learn a lot whenever we put something out and get feedback from you all. Showing Dota 2 to the world at The International gave us a lot of feedback to chew through, and the many recent forum threads talking about the information leaking out of the beta has added to the pile. After a bunch of thinking, we’ve decided to change our plans a little.

Our original plan was to spend the next year or so in beta, adding new features and slowly growing the number of heroes until we reached a level of parity with Dota 1, at which point we’d release Dota 2 to the world. But the feedback we’re seeing everywhere is that people just want to play it, even though there’s still a ton of heroes yet to be implemented. We’ve also seen that the folks who are already in the beta are chomping at the bit to show everyone else some of the fun games they’ve had. So we decided our original plan was dumb.

Welcome to the new plan: We’re going to take the current version of Dota 2, which has The International set of heroes, and get it out there as fast as we can. We’ve still got some work to do in a couple of areas, so we’ll be keeping it invite-only for a (hopefully short) period of time. But there’ll be no restrictions on what players can do with it – they can release screenshots, make movies, shoutcast matches, write guides, publicly make fun of our HUD, or anything else their hearts desire. While they do that, we’ll be shipping regular updates with more heroes, new features we’ve been working on, and improvements on the existing content as we get more and more feedback.

What does this mean for you? It means it’s even more important that you get on the list that we’ll be inviting from. If you’re talented, you could take a shot at winning an invite in the GosuGamers competition or the Playdota contest. Once you’ve got your hands on the game, feel free to talk about it however you’d like – we’re excited to see what you’ll produce.

In the meantime, we’re going to be ratcheting this blog up a little too, so you can expect some more regular posting from us.